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OC Raid Etiquette!

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Note: This is the raiding etiquette which applies to OC-organized raids. Feel free to use any section of these guidelines in your personal raids as well for a more enjoyable raiding experience!

Trust your Team!
Trust your Commander!
Focus on You!
Be considerate!

All community members are required to follow the Community Guidelines, however, raids are a team effort and require individual team members to work together. Once a raid team has gathered, the ten members usually spend several hours together, so it is very important that everyone within the team feels comfortable and can enjoy themselves. In order to ensure this, we have built additional raid-specific guidelines. Please take them seriously, even if they seem restrictive or unnecessary to you at first glance. It can be a terrible experience to be stuck for hours in a "tilted" raid team.

Raiding Etiquette

This is a short version of the guidelines, covering the main points we'd like everyone to always keep in mind:

You are responsible for yourself and yourself only. Every member of a raid group has a specific task, and as your teammates trust you to do yours, you need to trust them to do theirs. There is never a need to check up on other members of the team!

Please accept that you are not the raid leader. We assign one person to command a raid group, so that the other nine members have the possibility to focus on themselves, their own performance, and their improvement. More than you trying to assist them, commanders appreciate it if you use this opportunity.

Keep any judgement of an encounter's or any of its aspects' difficulty or the difficulty of playing any profession or performing any special task in raid encounters to yourself. Remember that what might be easy for you is not necessarily easy for others. Other players have different circumstances or even handicaps that may make aspects of the game a lot harder for them.

Our commanders will always strive to not criticize raiders during the run, especially during training runs, to create a positive environment (this is usually handled privately after the run). However, sometimes a commander needs to give some feedback to move things forward. Please understand that this is not about you personally, but for the benefit of the group.

Please refrain from linking various content in TeamSpeak and try to keep communication in the squad chat during the raid. Most of your teammates do not have more than one screen and don't appreciate having to tab in and out of the game to read up on your TeamSpeak messages, let alone open a browser window to follow your links.

Remember that etiquette is always about allowing everyone to feel as comfortable as possible. As static groups form, a group dynamic will also appear, and you will notice that some of these points apply to your group more than others - that's ok! As long as everyone within that static group is comfortable with how it's being run!

Finally, note that these are not the same as pick-up-group (PUG) raids. The Raid Team strives for these runs to be structured in a streamlined fashion where the Commander has everything covered so that the other 9 raiders can focus on their own performance. Your experience with other raid groups may be different, but please respect the effort our Commanders are making by following these guidelines.

Complete Guidelines

This is a more extended version of the guidelines, for those avid readers who do want to take the time and go through everything and make sure they are prepared ! Mainly note that points I. and II. have a number of sub-articles, which we felt were important to stress. Points III.-V. are identical to the short version, but may be extended in the future if necessary.

You are responsible for yourself and yourself only. Every member of a raid group has a specific task, and as your teammates trust you to do yours, you need to trust them to do theirs. There is never a need to check up on other members of the team!

Do not give teammates advice on how to play their profession unless directly asked. We are sure you mean well, but not everyone appreciates it and you have to respect that. There is often more than one way to play a profession and what works for you does not necessarily work for someone else. Your teammates need to be given the opportunity to experiment and find their own way. Even if some choices don't make sense to you, you can be certain that your teammates have their reasons. Should there really be a serious problem, your commander noticed it and has either already solved it or is trying to. They most likely just chose to do so privately. If you want to make sure, send your commander a private message.

Do not check on other team member's food and utility and do not call for food checks.

We want to discourage the use of any third party addon to measure other party member's statistics, like DPS or boon uptime. It is not your job to measure other people's performance, and many raiders actually find themselves focusing too much on their damage output while under-performing overall in the raid.

Please accept that you are not the raid leader. We assign one person to command a raid group, so that the other nine members have the possibility to focus on themselves, their own performance, and their improvement. More than you trying to assist them, commanders appreciate it if you use this opportunity.

There is no need to explain or answer questions about the encounter, neither in TeamSpeak nor in chat. It is your commander's job to explain and it does not help anyone to have the same question answered multiple times in different ways and channels of communication. Most often that is more confusing or distracting than actually helpful. If you think your commander forgot something crucial, send them a private reminder. But don't be surprised if your commander has a different view on what is more and what is less important, or simply explains mechanics in a different order and planned on mentioning what you thought was missing at a later time.

Do not call mechanics unless the commander asks you to do so. This often ends with several people calling the same thing and that is neither necessary nor helpful.

Leave the decision about the team's tactical approach to an encounter to your commander. Our commanders are trained to know every encounter from several different tactics and perspectives. Every team is different and what works in one group does not necessarily work in another. You can always ask for their reasons for a decision, if you don't understand or disagree. Obviously commanders are not perfect and can make a mistake or misjudge and there is always room for discussion. But, although discussions about tactics and which skills and traits of which profession could be useful in what situation are certainly educational and fun, the commander makes the final decision and when he or she tells you to stop, stop. You always have the possibility to further discuss the matter after the raid.

Do not call for ready checks. Your commander automatically claims to be ready when initiating the ready check - if they haven't initiated it yet, they might still be dealing with an issue you are not aware of, like answering a question in whisper chat. Commanders will do a ready check on their own once they are actually ready.

Do not criticise your teammates or assign blame for your team's difficulties to another member of the team, neither publicly nor privately directly to the team member in any form. If you believe there to be a problem, send your commander a private message. Always use the commander as a proxy for feedback about other team members.

Keep any judgement of an encounter's or any of its aspects' difficulty or the difficulty of playing any profession or performing any special task in raid encounters to yourself. Remember that what might be easy for you is not necessarily easy for others. Other players have different circumstances or even handicaps that may make aspects of the game a lot harder for them.

Our commanders will always strive to not criticize raiders during the run, especially during training runs, to create a positive environment (this is usually handled privately after the run). However, sometimes a commander needs to give some feedback to move things forward. Please understand that this is not about you personally, but for the benefit of the group.

Please refrain from linking various content in TeamSpeak and try to keep communication in the squad chat during the raid. Most of your teammates do not have more than one screen and don't appreciate having to tab in and out of the game to read up on your TeamSpeak messages, let alone open a browser window to follow your links.